My Big Fat Indian Wedding.(Top Shelf)

Byline: Sameer Reddy

During wedding season, it's impossible to cruise Marine Drive without getting held up in traffic.

On July 29, 1981, Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer got married in St. Paul's Cathedral before 3,500 invited guests and an estimated television audience of 750 million. At the time, it was the most viewed program ever broadcast, a testimony to the power fairy-tale weddings hold over the popular imagination, especially when the groom and bride are a real-life prince and princess. Today, wedding ceremonies are rarely on that grand a scale--at least in the West. On the Subcontinent, however, the bridal business is booming, and fantasy weddings are everywhere.

Indian weddings are, by nature, more involved than Western ones. They last anywhere from three to seven days, involve multiple religious functions and feature guest lists that can stretch to 25,000 people. They're seen as community--as opposed to strictly family--affairs. But those social conventions have taken on new extravagance in light of the country's astonishing economic growth.

Business people are leading the trend. Billionaire steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal set the gold standard with the 2004 union of his daughter, Vanisha, to Amit Bhatia, a London-based investment banker. Rumored to have spent more than $60 million, Mittal chartered jets to ferry the 1,000 guests to Paris, where most were put up in the five-star InterContinental Le Grand Hotel for the duration of the five-day event. Mittal rented the 17th-century chateau and garden of Vaux le Vicomte for the marriage ceremony and the romantic Jardin des Tuileries for the sangeet dinner, the Indian version of a bachelorette party, where women celebrate together. The engagement ceremony was held at the iconic Palace of Versailles. Guests were treated to private tours of the palace, then entertained with a re-enactment of the bride and groom's love story, penned by a leading Bollywood writer. The biggest coup, however, was the Bollywood spectacular held at the Parc de St-Cloud, where A-list stars such as Shah Rukh Khan, Rani Mukherjee and Saif Ali Khan performed, followed by a surprise appearance by Kylie Minogue at 2:30 in the morning.

High-profile weddings have taken on a celebrity aura thanks in part to the heightened visibility of Indians among the international jet set. Drawing guests from the worlds of film, music, fashion and society, these marriages have become some of the most coveted social invitations for the world's party people--not to mention a lucrative source of income. Playboy Arun Nayar's marriage to actress Elizabeth Hurley last year was featured by Hello! magazine in a multimillion-dollar deal that included coverage of their Hindu ceremony at the Umaid Bhawan Palace in Jodhpur, which ...